Isn't that what the forums does already? If you want to see recent forum content, just click on the forums link. The good thing about the way the home page is set up now is that sometimes there's good stuff that gets no comments. You could quickly lose that if there were a bunch of forum topics going wild.

Yes

Posted by Nerhael on Nov 20, 2006

That is what the forums link does now, but to be honest, I stopped clicking there a long time ago, typically because most of the posting was on recent posts themselves.

I think the layout of the homepage would be updated to allow for more content to show up, and new posts vs new articles would both get flagged. I'd just prefer one page where everything 'new' showed up basically. I would also say that we are seldom seeing lots of posts across multiple topics that would really push down a new topic that fast.

Also, I know I've managed to completely miss new posts now and then because they don't have that "NEW* thing beside them.

.

Posted by phduffy on Nov 20, 2006

Hm, so maybe two 'new' flags? One for the articles and one for forum posts?

I'm surprised that you don't click on the forums link though. Isn't that a flaw* of yourself, rather than the web design here?

*flaw here should be taken incredibly lightly

Personally

Posted by Nerhael on Nov 20, 2006

I'd call that a design flaw. You always want to minimize user effort/clicks to get at information.

Ultimately, the information on the homepage should present all *new* content, regardless of whether it's a flat out new topic, or an existing topic with a new response to it.

I would say that any site design that allows a user to easily not see new content/use the site's function, (like this), is more a flaw of the system than the user.

I stopped checking it cause typically it showed me something new. That became habit, hence when it did have something new, I would miss it. A personal flaw I feel was generated by the nature of our site.

either http, https, or..

Posted by crux on Nov 21, 2006

This wasn't on your list, but I think I've mentioned it to you before. I'd like to have the ability to comment on specific replies within a post; so kind of a multi-tier response structure. Especially when there's a particularly lengthy discussion going on it can be confusing to figure out which previous post someone is responding to. Some would say the confusion only ads to the discussion (and maybe they're right), but this is my suggestion. Now if you did this we would probably need to tag individual replies as 'New' since just scrolling to the bottom won't necessarily show you all of the latest posts.

If you need help testing any new features I might have considerably more free time on my hands soon. My company is hemorrhaging money so bad right now I'm frequently tempted to shout out "MEDIC!!" while reviewing our expense and revenue reports.

Yikes

Posted by phduffy on Nov 21, 2006

I would like to strongly voice my disagreement with crux's idea of tiered-responses.

This assumes that your idea would create forums that look anything like POE's forums. POE's forums are the worst I have ever seen, and I honestly don't think I'd follow discussion here if it was like that. If I'm understanding this incorrectly, please explain it to me.

Also, I liked the new look, the white on black. It reminds me of the BestPage in the Universe, and anything that reminds me of that can't be bad.

Now, there's too much going on there, but the basics are: the middle of the page shows all the new content. On the right, you see the most recent forum activity, as well as the most recent poster. And you can bookmark threads so that you'll instantly be able to see if anyone's commented on them.

it loads your post

Posted by crux on Nov 21, 2006

No, not like POE's forums. I dislike the way they're structured as well. There's too much clicking involved in trying to follow a thread. I'm thinking more like LiveJournal style. How can I explain it? Like all the replies would still be openly visible on the page. I'm just talking about organizing them in a different way. So if you wanted to reply to something someone said in the 3rd post of a thread with 15 posts, rather than your post appearing at the bottom as the 16th post it would be displayed under the 3rd post slightly indented to indicate that it's a reply to that specific post. Does that make ANY sense at all?

.

Posted by phduffy on Nov 21, 2006

Ah, okay. I think that makes sense. So your post would be indented a little or something? Or... Hm, so each reply to the original article shows up normally. Then, if you reply to one of those replies, you get indented. Repeat as desired?